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If each age gets the Trek we deserve I wanna know what we finally did right. It ain’t Faux Trek, it’s REAL Trek, actually entertaining, adventurous, and enjoyable. I feel sad for the whiny fans who feel the need to complain about it. You’ve missed the point on Trek for 45 years.

I guess it depends on what you consider heroic. I really only liked the original and Enterprise. I don't find the Faux Trek characters admirable or heroic; it rather reminded me of the episode in which the originals were all grasping, impulsive, and ultimately shallow.

I'm not into shallow, not even in my space opera, which is why I loathe Star Bores.

I think I understood the point of Star Trek from the beginning--and I did watch from the very first broadcast. That was an optimistic view of the future, not only of human harmony, but of human curiosity driven to explore. It's a very American view of the future--at least of America circa 1966, an idealized meritocracy. (Take a look at the crew of the Seaview during the same time period.) Humankind ventured out into the universe, not to conquer, not to make an empire--but to explore, sometimes with alien species.

It wasn't about geewhiz special effects and it wasn't about Mercedes Lackey-esque fantasy silliness about some young kid Being Born So Special they get where they are on the strength of being born that way. (That ain't American.) It was about working hard to chase a dream, and getting there if you were good enough and worked hard enough.

I think I understood Star Trek pretty well.

It would have been far more honest to rename the characters and the universe and go from there. Calling Faux Trek Star Trek is bait and switch, and I'm not fooled.

See I think you missed a lot. For one thing there was certainly a lot of Being Born So Special. TOS established the idea that the Enterprise has what’s often referred to by fen as “the god crew”, everybody is absolutely positively the best at their position, Kirk is the youngest captain, Scotty hotwires the Enterprise to out perform all other Constitution class vessels, Bones cures incurable diseases in days, they always out perform. It’s the nature of Trek, continued in every show, that crew is always better than any other crew that encountered the same problem.

And no Trek really isn’t about working hard to chase dreams. It’s about a society where technology has solved all the material problems, so now the people get to do whatever they want. Ever wonder what the majority of society does in the Federation? Mostly it seems to be nothing. They have replicators, they don’t need jobs. Sure some of them chase dreams, because they don’t need jobs, nothing much else to do when the replicators provide all.

Trek is ultimately a pretty shallow show. Yeah they hooked some messages in a few episodes. But even those are pat mimeographs about societal problems people have been complaining about for ever, with a little cheap makeup. Their attempts not to be shallow show the shallowness, that’s why the best episodes are the fun one like Tribbles and Shore Leave.

There’s no bait and switch. You fooled yourself, a lot of Trek fans do, they focus on eps like Last Battlefield and completely forget the joy of “brain brain and brain what is brain”. It’s real Trek, fun and crazy with the god crew, and maybe a moral lesson in there somewhere.